I have Lightroom 4.4 and the free trial of the Nik collection. I have 160 images that I'd like to run through Dfine 2 for noise reduction. If I select multiple images and send them to the plugin however, most of them do not actually get edited. For example, if I select all the images, it might take an hour or two to process, but then none of the images actually get sharpened. When the plugin loads, it displays "1 out of 160" as it should, but saving all doesn't have any effect. If I select five at once, I get two or three that actually get sharpened. If I select 20, only one gets sharpened.

Is this a limitation of the plugin? A limitation of Lightroom? I love the Nik collection so far, but if it has limitations like this, I'm not sure it will be actually worth buying.

I was sort of afraid that would be the answer. I'm sort of trying to avoid Photoshop. Of course it's the best, but it's pretty pricy, given that I'm just a hobbyist. Still, it seems odd to me that Dfine will acknowledge that I loaded X files into it and go through an hour of processing just to forget to actually save the files when it's done.
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rmartJun 4 '13 at 14:41

Of course, if you already have Lightroom and are applying the same noise corrections across a collection of photos - Lightroom can do this very easily already. It doesn't support some of the more detailed functions that Dfine can though, such as masking of the adjustments in a precise manner.

A third option might be to use something like Neat Image which is a standalone application that can batch process and is very reasonably priced at $39USD.

Unfortunately for me, this appears to be correct (for now.) I contacted Nik support: ""Unfortunately, our software is not meant to be batch processed in Lightroom. It only works with batch processing in Photoshop. As you have noticed, you can bring multiple files into Dfine 2 at one time if you're running through Lightroom, but it is not a true batch, as you still will need to edit each separately. If you wish to do that, you'll need to edit the first image, then proceed to edit each image after that.""
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rmartJun 6 '13 at 18:49